Thursday, May 2, 2013

Autumn Sonata (1978)

Although Autumn
Sonata borders on self-parody because writer-director Ingmar Bergman
indulges his pain-freak sensibilities to an excessive degree, the innate
humanism and sophistication of his style—combined with two extraordinary
performances—give the picture resonance. A tough drama about the ways parents
and children hurt each other when they’re unable to connect, the film is
particularly noteworthy as the only project on which cinema’s two most famous
Bergmans collaborated: Swedish-born Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman returned to
her native land (and her native tongue) to give one of the most affecting
performances of her career.

Swedish-cinema icon Liv Ullmann plays Eva, a
middle-aged woman living in a remote part of Sweden with her husband, meek
pastor Viktor (Halvar Björk). Eva excitedly prepares for a rare visit by her
mother, Charlotte (Bergman), a world-famous concert pianist. Immediately upon
Charlotte’s arrival, however, myriad complications in the mother/daughter
dynamic become evident. For instance, Charlotte is supremely chilly and
withholding. Accordingly, while Eva was growing up, Charlotte was an absentee
parent who expected her domestic existence life to be sunny and undemanding; by
shunning family-oriented stress, Charlotte made real emotional connection with
her daughter impossible. As a result, Eva became bitter, insecure, and needy.
Thus, upon reuniting with her mother, Eva can’t stop herself from dumping loads
of resentment onto Charlotte given the slightest opportunity. Furthermore, Eva
surprises Charlotte by revealing that Charlotte’s other daughter, Eva’s sister
Helena (Lena Nyman), is living in Eva’s house. Helena is severely disabled, and
Charlotte finds time spent in Helena’s company excruciating—Helena radiates
emotional thirst that Charlotte cannot quench.

Filmed in extremely close
quarters (the story rarely leaves Viktor’s humble house), Autumn Sonata is suffocatingly bleak. Writer-director Bergman almost
never leavens the intense psychodrama with brightness or humor, so viewers are
smothered by the dysfunction and pain of two complex women caught in an abusive
cycle. At one point, the picture gets so heavy that Eva muses, via voice-over,
how much she wishes she could simplify her existence by committing suicide. It
is a testament to both leading actors that neither Charlotte nor Eva comes
across as caricatured or contrived; these people seem agonizingly real.

Adding
to the grim quality of the experience is Ingmar Bergman’s choice to treat the
piece more like a novel or play than pure cinema; actors speak in long,
unbroken monologues and, on many occasions, speak directly to the camera or in
theatrical soliloquies. Were it not for the amber-tinged beauty of Sven
Nykvist’s cinematography and the consummate skill of the leading performances,
the film’s arty flourishes would be fatal flaws. But with writer-director
Bergman’s masterful hand pulling the strings, Autumn Sonata feels less like indulgence and more like an
experiment—it’s as if the filmmaker deliberately discarded arbitrary
storytelling conventions and used whatever tools he could in order to push as
deeply into the anguished souls of his characters as possible.